The HURD was meant to be the true kernel at the heart of the GNU operating system. The promise behind the HURD was revolutionary -- a set of daemons on top of a microkernel that was intended to surpass the performance of the monolithic kernels of traditional Unix systems and in doing so, give greater security, freedom and flexibility to the users -- but it has yet to come down to earth.

It is excellent business idea: someone else develops and does all the hard work, you just bundle and sell it. Easy peasy. Get rich.

Tell that to the graveyard of Linux businesses like Linspire, Corel Linux and VA Software. Canonical would be in that graveyard as well if it wasn't funded with slush funds from the tech boom.

The problem with investing in Linux is that your competitors can take your R&D without paying a cent. Novell and Red Hat make money from Linux by selling support, not the actual software. They are not getting rich and Novell in fact has been privately put up for sale.

If you try to found a large company around FreeBSD, then you will have problems. Someone else owns it.

Red Hat could just as easily sell RedBSD.

Blizzard did not care if someone else earned money on SC1. So SC1 could become big.

Proprietary software can also make you rich and you don't have to give out your R&D. Getting rich by software is difficult and even moreso if your competitor can just take your innovative additions and stamp their corporate logo on them.